Re: Embedded BitTorrent: 5 of 5
Guy Macon
Embedded BitTorrent: 5 of 5
Peer-to-peer poisoners: A tour of MediaDefender
18 March 2007 By Nate Anderson
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/mediadefender.ars
A war of attrition
When your company poisons peer-to-peer networks for a living, public
relations usually takes a back seat to discretion; quiet is the rule in the
P2P content-protection industry. That's why Jonathan Lee, the company's VP
of business development, isn't worried that the corporate web site is down
when I reach him in his Santa Monica office. "It's kind of ugly anyway," he
says.
For a company like MediaDefender, the largest such firm in existence,
privacy comes naturally, but a 2005 acquisition by ArtistDirect has
encouraged the firm to take its services public as it starts to look beyond
its original client base-music labels and movie studios-and dives headfirst
into the brave new world of providing legitimate P2P content for
advertisers.
Such advertising deals may be the future, but the company's bread and
butter continues to be P2P disruption of movies and music downloads.
MediaDefender is quite good at this, as it should be after five years of
anti-piracy work. Unlike DRM providers that focus on protecting the
product, MediaDefender tries to protect the distribution channel-and only
for a limited time. Recognizing that it is impossible to shut down the
sharing of copyrighted works, the company focuses instead on mitigation.
Record labels and movie companies can pay between $5,000 and $15,000 per
title for differing levels of protection that extend over different time
periods.
For most content owners, MediaDefender's services are needed at the
beginning of a product's life cycle. Lee points out that most movies and
albums makes the majority of their money in the first few months after
release. MediaDefender's value proposition is not that it can stop such
files from being shared, but that it can make sharing difficult for a month
or two in order to give the legitimate product more traction.
Is it live or is it MediaDefender?
How it works
To work its magic on the various P2P networks, Lee describes four
strategies that MediaDefender uses. All four are powered by a back end of
2,000 servers co-located around the world, and the company has contracts
for 9GBps of Internet bandwidth. For a 60-person operation, these numbers
are (to put it mildly) a bit high, but the scale of its system usually
ensures that the company gets prompt attention and good deals when it goes
shopping. It also means that employees who stay late after work to game on
the corporate LAN always have a good connection.
Those 2,000 servers do four things that MediaDefender refers to as
decoying, spoofing, interdiction, and swarming. Here's how they work...
Four main methods
Decoying. This, in a nutshell, is the serving of fake files that are
generally empty or contain a trailer. The goal is to make legitimate
content a needle in a haystack, so MediaDefender works hard to ensure that
its copies of files show up in the top ten spots when certain keywords are
searched for. Everything about the file is tailored to look like the work
of pirates, from the file size (movies are often compressed enough to fit
on a CD) to the naming conventions to the pirate scene tag. With massive
bandwidth and plenty of servers, the company has little trouble in getting
these decoy files to appear at the top of search results, but decoying has
a down side: the bandwidth. Because MediaDefender actually serves these
large but bogus files, it incurs a significant bandwidth bill by using this
technique.
Spoofing. Spoofing sends searchers down dead ends. MediaDefender coders
have written their own software that interacts with the various P2P
protocols and sends bogus returns to search requests, usually directing
people to nonexistent locations. Because most people only look at the top
five search results, MediaDefender tries to frustrate their first attempts
to download a file in hopes that they will just give up.
Interdiction. While the first two techniques try to prevent searchers from
locating files, interdiction prevents distributors from serving them. The
tool is generally used when media is leaked or newly released; the goal is
to slow its spread in those crucial first days. MediaDefender servers
attempt to create constant connections to the files in question, saturating
the provider's upstream bandwidth and preventing anyone else from grabbing
the data.
Swarming. Though he acknowledges the BitTorrent networks can be hard to
disrupt, Lee points out that MediaDefender can use "swarming" to make life
more difficult for users trying to download copyrighted content. BitTorrent
works by using a hash file to reassemble a file from many pieces, each of
which may have been downloaded from a different user. MediaDefender simply
serves up its chunks of these files, but instead of providing the proper
data, its chunks contain static or nothing at all. BitTorrent will discard
such junk data, but a flood of it can slow a user's download to a crawl.
Does all of this really curtail P2P usage? Lee admits that the company will
never stop file-swapping, but says that isn't the point of what it does.
Instead, the goal is to make files hard to find for a short period of time
so that studios, music labels, and artists can make money from selling the
legitimate product. Companies that use MediaDefender's services will often
run their own download tests (or contract with one of the firms that does
this) to make sure that they are receiving a return on their investment.
Apparently, they are. MediaDefender counts every major music label and most
studios among its clients, with the notable exception of Disney. Lee says
that initially, his company expected to work largely with trade
organizations like the RIAA and the MPAA. When it actually approached them,
however, the trade groups were more focused on court cases and
Congressional lobbying. While they approve of MediaDefenders's work, the
actual contracts are signed directly with labels and studios, many of whom
pay millions for the company's services.
A brave new world: advertising
In recent months, MediaDefender has shifted some of its efforts in a new
direction: using its P2P technology and massive bandwidth to serve files,
rather than stop them. Last year, the company partnered with Jay-Z and Coke
in a widely-covered promotion that saw MediaDefender pushing a legitimate
piece of Jay-Z concert footage to fans who searched for videos by the
artist. In essence, these are "decoys" that contain real content.
The company has also helped promote Vitamin Water commercials that were
deemed too "edgy" for network television, along with video game trailers
and exclusive P2P remixes. The goal is to diversify-a necessary safeguard
in an industry that has few clients. There simply aren't that many major
movie studios and music labels, but there are millions of potential clients
with fat ad budgets who wouldn't mind reaching the millions of young,
tech-savvy people who make use of P2P networks.
Lee says that even music and movie companies have changed their stance in
the last few years, and while none condone illegal downloads, they have
realized that this is a huge potential market. This is especially true for
smaller indie labels, for whom exposure is sometimes more important than
legitimate sales. Some of these small firms have actually paid
MediaDefender to serve content by their acts, often in response to users
searching for a related (but better known) artist.
This mingling of licit and illicit content on P2P networks raises some
questions, of course. How are users to know in advance if content is legal
or not? Are some labels actually encouraging the use of such networks, even
as their trade groups prosecute those who use them? Does serving legitimate
content show confusion about what can and cannot be shared and downloaded?
This was, in fact, a major concern that the industry had. For years,
content owners refused to place any legal material on P2P networks for fear
of legitimizing them. That fear largely vanished in the wake of the Supreme
Court's Grokster decision. Once it was well established that such networks
could be held liable for copyright infringement, content owners actually
felt more free to make use of the networks for legitimate uses of their
own.
But anti-piracy work still accounts for 99 percent of MediaDefender's
work-work that Lee knows is not popular in all circles. Last year, for
instance, the company began recruiting on college campuses for the first
time. Students would approach company reps and tell them that they hated
what they did. "But five minutes later," says Lee, "they came back and
asked us for a job." Hackers, he says, "love screwing with each other," and
MediaDefender gives them an impressive platform and some serious bandwidth
to hack on. Besides, "you can't get that mad" about what the company does,
Lee says with a laugh. "I mean, you're looking for pirated stuff!"
Update:
Various forum posters and bloggers have commented on MediaDefender's
"swarming" claim in particular, arguing that BitTorrent's hash-based
technology prevents file disruption and that MediaDefender could simply not
disrupt the network. We contacted the company for clarification and were
told that the details of their BitTorrent work remain secret, but that the
company does indeed employ swarming on BitTorrent networks.
Because of the anti-corruption technology on such networks, MediaDefender
tries to stall downloads and make files frustrating to grab by serving bad
data. The file corruption discussed in the article should not have
referenced BitTorrent; such swarming causes corruption only on networks
without similar error-checking (the article text has been corrected).
MediaDefender's goal with BitTorrent is to slow down transfers. Making them
slow enough counts as a "win" for the company, though this does seem like a
hollow victory, as the consumer still has the correct file in the end.
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